[HN Gopher] Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for...
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Brain-Computer Interface Smashes Previous Record for Typing Speed
Author : 5rest
Score : 127 points
Date : 2021-06-07 13:34 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| fouric wrote:
| > The fastest of these previous typing-by-brain experiments
| allowed people to type about 40 characters, or 8 words, per
| minute.
|
| Ah, so it's previous record for _BCI typing speed_ , not "typing
| speed" in general. Original headline (on IEEE side) is
| misleading.
| kibwen wrote:
| For the record, it looks like the record for typing on standard
| keyboards is 212 WPM (on both QWERTY and DVORAK, amusingly),
| while the record on a stenography keyboard is 375 WPM.
| SomewhatLikely wrote:
| Any idea on the speed of dictation?
|
| Edit: Found a reference that average dictation speed is
| around 150wpm, but also mentions some tests going up to
| almost 300. So it would seem the average person could be
| almost 4 times faster speaking rather than typing.
| https://www.reference.com/business-finance/average-
| dictation...
| anandoza wrote:
| Yes, I thought the exact same as you -- that the headline meant
| a BCI achieved like 400 wpm or something.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| What's the better measure of typing speed: full words correct
| with no typos, or full words typos included?
|
| A buddy of mine used some timing app for our typing speeds, you
| had to backspace repeatedly to retype a word if you misspelled
| it. I argued that is unrealistic, you can just use spell check or
| just catch the typos during your editing read through.
| martin_a wrote:
| > What's the better measure of typing speed
|
| Full words correct with no typos.
|
| If you want to measure this, you're interested in the
| combination of reading speed and muscle memory while typing. If
| you're making typos, your muscle memory is not good. Using a
| spell checker to automatically fix those words... Well, the
| number is not comparable, then.
| jameshart wrote:
| How does 'muscle memory' apply to a brain computer interface?
| martin_a wrote:
| OP was talking about comparing typing speeds with his
| buddy, not the neural interface.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| That feels pedantic to me. A more important, but also more
| difficult, measure would be of information conveyed,
| regardless of how it's accomplished.
|
| A very effective friend of mine once said if your messages
| are perfect you're spending the oo much time on them.
| Izkata wrote:
| > the oo much time
|
| Was that intentional? Looks like the other two replies may
| have read right past that without noticing it...
| martin_a wrote:
| "Measuring typing speed" is just silly, if you ask me. For
| the reasons you already pointed out.
|
| Typing speed is not about understanding information to its
| fullest, it's just a somewhat quirky metric for the speed
| of replication of words.
| D13Fd wrote:
| It depends on the context. If you write for a living, then
| one relevant metric is how quickly you type with no errors
| (although perhaps a better metric would be how quickly you
| get error-free work product out, including revisions).
|
| If you're talking about who can send text messages to
| another person faster, then the "typos included" metric
| makes more sense.
| mech422 wrote:
| My typing class in high school only accepted perfect speed
| tests. No errors at all. Given how many typos I see in even
| business correspondence, I wonder if 'editing read through' has
| gone the way of the manual typewriter :-P
| castis wrote:
| This is the "next" technology I'm excited about. A cap/something
| that lets me provide another input device to my machine where I
| can treat it like a keyboard. Imagine being able to think about a
| chord and have that input sent to stdin.
|
| What could be extra cool is just imagining a loop construct in
| your head and it just appears in your text editor.
|
| Is there already a scene for this? Sign me up.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I'll be excited when it lets me do things I can't yet, like
| control a second pair of arms. Every piano player's dream.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Robotic extra thumb:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2277955-this-robotic-
| ex...
|
| But they use toes to control the thumb instead of BMI.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I write at 50 wpm, type at 100, and speak at 150, a brain
| interface would have to be 300 or more to make it worth wearing
| another wearable.
| D13Fd wrote:
| That's surprising to me. I mean, if I could put on a headband
| or hat and "type," hands free and wirelessly, on any connected
| Bluetooth device, that would be pretty incredible even if it
| only went at a portion of my current speed/accuracy.
|
| Obviously, that's still sci fi at this point, but that's what
| you seem to be rejecting here.
|
| To each their own, I guess.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| I type only slightly.slower than I think, so really no keyboard
| interface would be worth my while.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is a really good point, I work in an area that requires
| careful written communication. So sometimes my thought output
| is only five words per minute, and that includes multiple
| revisions which would look crazy using a brain interface. :)
| ckemere wrote:
| Lots of discussion of WPM speed. Prof. Shenoy presented at our
| weekly seminar (shameless plug - https://twitter.com/RiceNeuro) a
| couple of weeks ago. I think he considers the goal to be reaching
| the rate of speech, which is about 150 WPM. Beyond that, I think
| that there's a strong argument that our brain is not completely
| generating/processing thought fast enough to substantially
| increase output rate.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > A machine learning algorithm then decodes the brain patterns
| associated with each letter, and a computer displays the letters
| on a screen. The participant was able to communicate at about 90
| characters, or 18 words, per minute.
|
| > By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study
| participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per
| minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at an
| average of about 40 words per minute.
|
| I had no idea average typing speed is this slow, though the
| extreme slowness of touchscreen typing is no surprise.
| vmception wrote:
| 65 year olds now had the same 30+ years as everyone else to get
| up to speed on computers but most still lean on the "hey you
| know I'm X-years old so you know me and computers don't get
| along especially with the texting heh heh"
|
| As there are also plenty of competent typists and computer
| users at that age, It's all about the influences, wonder how I
| can avoid that and brain plasticity excuses
| Zancarius wrote:
| > It's all about the influences
|
| This is key. Everything else is an excuse.
|
| My Mum is in her 70s and until she lost feeling in one of her
| hands (chemotherapy 23-ish years ago) she was an exceedingly
| fast touch typist. Even without feeling in her hands, she
| could still type at ~40 WPM, possibly higher depending on
| what she was typing. Arthritis means she now mostly uses a
| tablet.
|
| But looking at other people in that age range, I can think of
| literally zero from church who even know how to touch type.
| It's probably the difference between someone who had to do
| secretarial work and someone who did not.
|
| I do think your first statement is absolutely on the mark.
| e.g., "I'm old, and I don't understand it, so I won't try."
|
| The old adage is still true: Whether you think you can or you
| can't you're probably right.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| As someone who is older, I'd phrase it slightly
| differently. "I'm old, my time on earth will be gone in
| less time than you've been alive, this thing you're all
| excited about seems silly and pointless and doesn't solve
| any problem I have, so I won't waste any of my precious
| time on it."
|
| This is part of why I've never used Facebook, Twitter, or
| any of the rest of it.
| elmomle wrote:
| Makes sense, though I think the same reasoning is often
| used to excuse obviously inefficient habits. Spending a
| week to learn to competently use a computer would likely
| save most people much more than a week over the following
| ten or even five years.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > wonder how I can avoid that and brain plasticity excuses
|
| I've worked on this question personally. I decided that the
| obvious first step to gaining the mental flexibility of
| youth, is to mimic youth:
|
| * Explore: When we're young, we constantly try new things,
| even when there isn't an apparent ROI. We try new arts, new
| experiences, new ideas, new hobbies, etc. We are not afraid
| to ignore the established way and invest in something new -
| often for the novelty (or rebellion) of it. We give the new
| things time; we play. We are curious, not critical - we
| wonder why and explore the idea instead of criticizing it and
| shutting it down. When we are old, we often stick to what we
| know well and criticize the rest.
|
| * Push yourself: In school or as a junior employee, you can't
| say 'I've always done it this way' or 'I'm not interested in
| learning something new'. You have to learn and adapt. When
| we're old, power corrupts - most people make those excuses
| and they are generally accepted. Nobody else will push you,
| as a rule.
|
| There are limits in life; I don't have as much free time now
| as when I was young, but that's not a deal-breaker (and I use
| time much more efficiently now, including by prioritizing and
| by knowing myself much better). Also, I don't 'play' like a 6
| year old or even a 25 year old; I do it my way.
|
| I also saw it as an interesting experiment: How much of
| mental changes were due to changes in practice and how much
| due to biology. I can't provide empirical data but especially
| Exploration seems to have changed my life, not only mentally
| but significantly, emotionally: I'm much more optimistic,
| less jaded, and more emotionally connected than I was. Life
| is invigorating. A warning though: I'm challenging some norms
| of age and therefore peers don't grasp and sometimes reject
| me. I wish I could get through to them.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| I'm curious about the WPM test methodology; for example if all
| those studies use a standardised method or not. Because at
| least the various WPM testing tools and websites are extremely
| inconsistent in different aspects.
|
| My own typing speed ranges from ~40WPM to ~110WPM depending on
| what tool or test method I'm using. For example some tests just
| use any random word from the dictionary, which of course
| includes very long and complicated ones, others go as far as to
| limit themselves to the 100 most common English words. And even
| with those factors being identical I can still get different
| speeds depending on the UI; the cursor movement, presentation
| of the text and input latency all have a measurable impact on
| the end result.
| airstrike wrote:
| Touchscreen typing on native keyboards always feels slow to me,
| but with apps like SwiftKey which remap the boundaries of the
| virtual keyboard to better match your intended keystrokes I can
| type significantly faster. Add swiping and completion to that
| and I'm pretty confident one can easily beat that 23wpm mark
| math-dev wrote:
| I thought Apple had a patent on this technology, interesting
| to see others do it
| gxs wrote:
| My average typing speed is 80-110, but I can max out at 121.
| This is for standard english words, not the crazy blocks of
| letters and special characters used for competition, which IMO
| isn't practical for the average user.
|
| I actually spend a few minutes every few weeks taking typing
| tests etc, as it's a valuable skill to me.
|
| I figure if the average typing speed is somewhere between 50-80
| WPM, if I can type 50% faster, in theory, I'm responding to
| emails and commenting in general 50% faster.
|
| It's just a nicer experience using a computer if you can type
| fast. Sometimes it's easier to command-backspace and retype an
| entire line/word than it is to move the cursor and correct the
| error. It's also just plain nice to have only your thoughts to
| worry about when typing and not have the cognitive overhead of
| trying to keep track of where all the letters on the keyboard
| are.
|
| All in all, I would recommend improving your typing speed if
| you spend any type of meaningful time on a computer.
|
| A fun 1-minute test that is somewhat practical here:
| 10fastfingers.com
| j7ake wrote:
| Are tasks like responding to emails and adding comments
| limited by typing speed ? I would have guessed most typing
| tasks aside from copying text are limited by knowing what to
| type.
| toast0 wrote:
| Sometimes, yes. If your brain gets too far ahead of your
| writing, then you need to pause thinking or you miss stuff.
|
| If this happens to you a lot, you might benefit from
| training your typing speed up. (or writing, or dictating,
| or whatever)
| bigdubs wrote:
| Keyboard wpm is about double; ~37-44wpm is P50. Still not super
| fast though.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I can do about 45-50 wpm on my phone with swype typing. It
| would probably be faster, but words like "our" and "off" are
| hard because it seems like it's luck whether the keyboard picks
| "or" or "our", of/off.
|
| Swype is pretty great for writing with a phone. I kind of wish
| there was an improved Swype though.
| Cheetah26 wrote:
| Swype is absolutely fantastic when it works right. I also
| agree that it would greatly benefit from having a better
| algorithm behind it.
|
| Given how accurate search suggestion algorithms are becoming,
| I find it surprising that keyboard suggestions are as bad as
| they are. If swype could have the same predictive abilities
| as search engines it would be a major boost in speed and
| comfort.
| vgeek wrote:
| I feel obligated to mention https://typeracer.com
| neosat wrote:
| Addictive. Thanks for sharing :)
| hughrr wrote:
| Well there went the last 30 minutes of my life. Turns out I
| can sustain 86wpm which is better than I expected. Was fun.
| Thank you :)
| justnotworthit wrote:
| The money shot: https://youtu.be/pcApwQxbagg?t=55
| mxmilkiib wrote:
| How long until an inner monologue cannot hide from the
| "authorities"?
|
| Also, Macross Plus, spoiler, for the subconscious throwing up
| images in a high stress environment;
| https://youtube.com/watch?t=2077&v=Fgg6p9gSeR0
| newsbinator wrote:
| > "It's at least half way to able-bodied typing speed, and that's
| why this paper is in Nature."
| lunixbochs wrote:
| > The participant was able to communicate at about 90
| characters, or 18 words, per minute.
|
| > By comparison, able-bodied people close in age to the study
| participant can type on a smartphone at about 23 words per
| minute, the authors say. Adults can type on a full keyboard at
| an average of about 40 words per minute.
| opan wrote:
| Thanks, I thought from the headline this was enabling over
| 200wpm maybe.
| zyemuzu wrote:
| Same. One of the reasons I hate using my phone to type is
| how slow I am compared to using a full keyboard. This would
| be hell for me.
| goldenkey wrote:
| The current generation is a bunch of thumb typers. Ye
| abandon all hope..
| toomanyducks wrote:
| I'll second the other Gen z person in the replies and say
| that lots of us hate thumb typing and if we're going to
| generalize across every single living person by one
| factor, my experience is that typing speed goes down with
| age.
| codefined wrote:
| I don't know if it's cultural, but as someone of the
| 'current generation' (Gen Z), I feel that the opposite is
| true and typing speeds increase as you get younger (to
| some limit).
|
| I've tried to back this up and only found a single,
| questionable, data source[0] on the topic but I do attend
| several typing competitions and some of the young ages
| are phenomenal. I was beaten a few months ago by a 15
| year old who was typing >220wpm+ for 5 minutes.
|
| [0] http://drwes.blogspot.com/2011/01/results-are-in-age-
| vs-typi...
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| The original iPhone is the perfect size for my hands and
| thumb typing.
|
| I was quite fast in landscape due to the placement of
| everything and my ability to also rock the phone while I
| typed. This increased my speed dramatically.
|
| Sadly, that is not really an option anymore as I gladly
| give it up for the larger real estate of the 6" models.
|
| If I have something long to say and I'm not too concerned
| about accuracy, I just use text to speech.
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| That makes me wonder whether cell phones should let you
| customize the keyboard, esp. the size of it.
| meowface wrote:
| I used to type "semi-competitively" (aka just spending a lot
| of time on typeracer.com) and could get around 170 WPM if I
| put enough effort into it. (At least when I was younger.
| Probably slower now.)
|
| 18 WPM would make me feel like a snail. However, I feel
| fairly confident that within 1 - 3 decades some kind of BCI
| will let any user surpass the equivalent of 200 - 300 WPM
| after a bit of training. And hopefully even with a device
| that sits on your head rather than in your brain.
|
| So I'm just kind of looking at this like ML research circa
| 1990. We're hardly even in the infancy stage yet.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| Where do you get that confidence? Reading the article, I'm
| mostly seeing somewhat deliberately hyped-up claims and
| hand-wavey references to AI, neither of which give me much
| confidence in this tech taking a tremendous leap anytime
| soon. Still _very_ impressive, but as someone who knows
| nothing about the tech, I 'm not sure why I should expect
| it to improve so quickly?
| faichai wrote:
| The fact that we can apparently detect repeatable
| patterns of brain activity, and do it across a few
| modalities (handwriting, cursor movements) shows that a
| lot of the core problems are solved. We've achieved Proof
| of Concept.
|
| With greater sensor fidelity, greater quantity of data,
| improved ML approaches combined with alternate detection
| targets (particularly subvocalisation) means that getting
| to faster than parity WPM seems like a realistic result.
| Incremental improvements to tech is something we humans
| are quite good at.
| fnord77 wrote:
| will such an interface ever be possible without invasive implants
| in your brain?
| carapace wrote:
| Yes. The "secret" is to use hypnosis to "program" your
| unconscious mind to emit signals corresponding to your
| conscious "stream of thought". The result is a subjective
| experience of thinking words and they appear on the screen.
| Someone else in this thread speculated about e.g. controlling
| an extra pair of (artificial) arms to play the piano with four
| hands. That sort of thing should be straightforward too.
|
| In re: the technology to take the signals and transduce them to
| e.g. a byte-stream without surgery. First was Galvanic Skin
| Response, then when IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) were
| miniaturized enough you could use those instead of GVR,
| nowadays (as I mentioned in a sib comment) you can use a camera
| and ML to recognize e.g. muscle twitches in the face or whole
| body.
|
| (I have no idea why people are not more interested in this
| angle, even BCI enthusiasts seem to have a blindspot here and
| just go on about surgery and implants. If anyone is interested,
| let me know and I can explain further. FWIW, I don't bother to
| do this myself because I can already type as fast as I need to.
| In fact, I was a hunt-and-peck typist for years! I'm not proud,
| just explaining why _I_ don 't bother to explore hypnotic low-
| tech BCI.)
| [deleted]
| computerlab wrote:
| I'm interested in hearing more about this approach, are there
| any papers on it? I see two different ideas here: the use of
| hypnosis to create unconscious "hooks" into conscious
| thought. This could be useful if for whatever reason certain
| features of conscious are not easy to detect (another comment
| mentioned that it's harder to get clear signals from the
| frontal cortex). Then there is the idea of using muscle
| twitched / GVS as an information channel. It seems hard to
| get a high bandwidth from this (compared to invasive or EEG-
| like approaches).
| carapace wrote:
| Cheers, and thanks for asking. :)
|
| > are there any papers on it?
|
| None that I know of, but I have never looked. Hypnosis in
| general has a hard time being accepted by conventional
| science (going back to Mesmer and Ben Franklin.)
|
| > the use of hypnosis to create unconscious "hooks" into
| conscious thought.
|
| Yes, this was literally one of the first things I learned
| when I started studying and using hypnosis: a binary
| Boolean signal from my unconscious to my conscious minds
| (idiosyncratically we (my conscious and unconscious minds)
| settled on twitch of the right arm shoulder for yes, left
| for no. Technically it's a _trinary_ signal, with no twitch
| indicating a "reformulate the query" or "does not compute"
| response.)
|
| Really, the thing to do is improve communication and report
| between the unconscious and conscious minds, operating with
| deliberate cooperation (rather than the _ad hoc_
| programming you get from life.) E.g. when I play chess I do
| not think about the moves, I look at the board and "just
| know" which move to make. I can actually decide whether to
| beat someone or lose, and by what degree! (As you can
| imagine, it makes chess dull.)
|
| > This could be useful if for whatever reason certain
| features of conscious are not easy to detect (another
| comment mentioned that it's harder to get clear signals
| from the frontal cortex).
|
| Yes, translating and amplifying signals is trivial, your
| brain does it all the time. However the entire point of
| having a "conscious mind" is tied up in being easy to
| detect. The ego is a communication device.
|
| > Then there is the idea of using muscle twitched / GVS as
| an information channel. It seems hard to get a high
| bandwidth from this (compared to invasive or EEG-like
| approaches).
|
| I actually have no clear idea of the bandwidth limits from
| the unconscious mind to some specific sensor system. Keep
| in mind that touch typing is already a form of this: the
| unconscious mind moves the fingers and a stream of text
| goes into the computer. Achieving that sort of bandwidth
| should be no problem: set up a binary signal on each finger
| and an "ACK" on the thumb and you can transmit bytes in
| parallel, eh? Build something like this "squeezebox"
| keyboard[1] or a dataglove[2] and use chords from greater
| bandwidth.
|
| We also have the face, a high-bandwidth output channel, and
| I have no doubt that a camera (or two) with a simple neural
| net could be used to train the system to recognize facial
| tics and expressions. You would have to be a little
| sophisticated in how you set up the feedback loops: you
| want to settle on motions that are easy for the face to
| make and for the NN to recognize. That's kind of a neat
| thought experiment. (No pun intended.)
|
| I don't doubt that you could get higher bandwidth from
| implants, I just don't think it's worth the surgery (for
| able-bodied folk. For people with paralysis it makes more
| sense.) Not EEG though (I know a neuroscientist who has
| experience with high density EEG and from what I gather
| it's just not that great. Like trying to find whales by
| analyzing surface waves.)
|
| [1] https://peterlyons.com/problog/2021/04/squeezebox-
| keyboard/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dataglove
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Depending on how much precision you need, it's already
| possible. An external interface can read gross changes in
| electrical activity that a person can learn to control. But
| it's pathetic compared to what the nerves can do.
| doggodaddo78 wrote:
| Speaking of BCI, there are startups intent on implanting
| thousands of nanoscale sensors directly in the brain to gather
| copious amounts of data directly.
| slver wrote:
| I wouldn't call it "copious amounts of data directly" you still
| gotta train yourself to use it, and the interface itself should
| train itself to recognize it.
|
| It might be enough to make people walk again though.
| onion2k wrote:
| "You are seeing this advert because we detected that you
| thought about the Budwesier 'Wassup!' advert that aired 22
| years ago and it increased dopamine uptake by 3.7%"
| spollo wrote:
| Interesting that the method for this interface was imagining
| writing the word, I guess too many random thoughts would enter
| your writing if it was just based on mental-verbalizing (saying
| it in your head).
|
| It would be really cool to have a BCI that runs off mental-
| verbalizing and have a chopper style rapper use it (eg. Busta
| Rhymes). Imagine people doing transcription learning chopping as
| skill to get an edge on their job!
| lmilcin wrote:
| Okay, first of all, this is great achievement.
|
| But comparing speeds isn't really necessary or even relevant. For
| a person that literally has no other way to communicate nobody
| will be complaining the can type 20% slower than a person with a
| smartphone. The fact they can type at all is important.
|
| Now, for the speeds, I type 80wpm/400cpm but what is more
| important I can also freely think while I do so. I don't even
| know consciously where the keys are on the keyboard, I need to
| focus on a character and then see where the finger goes as if I
| was bystander, a passenger of a mech body that observes it do
| something.
|
| I can only assume that writing with brain-computer interface
| requires incredible focus and most likely engagement of visual
| cortex which would preclude from using it for anything else (so
| no ability to imagine any imagery while typing).
| amelius wrote:
| Most people use their visual cortex to see what they are
| typing, though.
|
| EDIT: I mean, on the screen (and perhaps some on their
| keyboards).
| grogenaut wrote:
| I look away from the screen while typing especially in bars,
| when I've got a long chain to get in. This has the side
| effect of having a few particular old dudes tell me to fuck
| off every once and a while, stop showings off... As I slam
| out 90wpm and look blankly past them.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Only while they are learning. Have you noticed when you type
| on the phone your fingers are flying more or less without you
| having to actually search for the letter?
|
| I have wondered about this and I think what is happening you
| actually learn the qwerty layout on your phone and the
| fingers already know more or less where to go and what you do
| visually is to just aim where your finger needs to go (ie
| find the center of the button) and the rest (like reading the
| letter) is most likely redundant.
|
| I don't know how to or have time to test this, though.
| [deleted]
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Why make a cynical assumption at all? Francis R. Willett,
| Donald T. Avansino, Leigh R. Hochberg, Jaimie M. Henderson, and
| Krishna V. Shenoy are real people. You could, you know, just
| ask them.
| lmilcin wrote:
| What cynical assumption? It is well known visual cortex can't
| do too many things at the same time. The famous gorilla
| experiment shows this. And if you need to imagine anything
| graphical it most likely involves visual cortex.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > But comparing speeds isn't really necessary or even relevant.
|
| This isn't a comparison between this and typing on a keyboard.
|
| It's a comparison to the prior state of the art in this
| technology.
| ramshanker wrote:
| Once this read the mind thing matures, so much of the software
| will have to be rewritten. Even now sometimes I have to joke
| around in office "PC is slower than me" because I gave certain
| commands in sequence and it is still performing them one by one
| while I wait for computer to catch up. Now imaging this, command
| directly from brain to the machine. In engineering world, It
| would increase the productivity by at et least 4x I guess.
|
| Currently to draw a line in AutoCAD, I have to either move the
| mouse to a "line" button and click it. OR type a command "line"
| if my hands are on keyboard. Now If I had a direct interface with
| the machine, just the the thought of "Draw a line" and software
| is line-drawing mode. Add eye tracking to it, and I simply look
| at the point on the screen when line shall start and say in my
| head "here"...... opportuties are endless.
|
| Computer will have difficult time catching up with the amount of
| commands we are capable of issuing to it. BRING IT ON.
|
| It was 2006, when I did Speec-To-Text data entry of 200+ mobile
| numbers using good old Windows XP. Progress seems to be have been
| too slow since than.
| whereis wrote:
| the ideal CAD operator has a series of personalized single key
| shortcuts on their left hand.
|
| I challenge you to put your top ten commands on single key or
| double-same key (e.g. zz) shortcuts on the left side of the
| keyboard. Your CAD skills will speed up significantly once
| these become muscle memory.
| carapace wrote:
| Apologies to those who've heard it before, but whenever BCI comes
| up I feel obliged to point out that, when you connect a computer
| to a brain, the _brain_ is the more sophisticated information
| processor.
|
| Use hypnosis.
|
| You can have effective fast communication to the machine without
| any fancy technology (and certainly without surgery!) The
| subjective experience is "think to type". I expect that these
| days you can use a camera and ML to "read thoughts" directly from
| facial muscles, no need for GVR or IMUs on the fingers.
| lhousa wrote:
| Shiny title with the actual typing speed so well hidden.
| slver wrote:
| 18 words/min
| SamBam wrote:
| It's silly that it's hidden, because 18 WPM for a quadriplegic
| still seems extremely impressive to me, given that it's just
| working from brain electrodes and not some muscle the person
| can control. Yes, the headline is silly, because by hiding it
| it ended up causing the snark about 18 WPM being slow.
|
| I'm surprised, though, that the most efficient way to do this
| is still to have the person imagine physically drawing the
| letters by hand. I know motor neurons are probably our most
| reliable output, but I would still think that, with all the
| advances in training from noisy data in the past decade, that
| training what the _thought_ of "A", "B" etc look like in the
| head would be doable.
|
| Or even what the thought of _hearing_ or _saying_ "A", "B" etc
| looks like. The auditory cortex is activated when we imagine
| sounds. Or, if they wanted to stick to motor neurons, could
| they have the person imagine saying the letters with their
| mouth?
|
| I'm sure they've thought about this stuff and it's harder than
| it seems, of course. But I would just predict that brain-
| computer interfaces 20 years from now won't involve imagining
| using your hand to write letters.
| goodpoint wrote:
| > 18 WPM for a quadriplegic still seems extremely impressive
| to me
|
| Honest question: how so? We should expect a direct neural
| interface to far exceed the speed of any manual input device,
| especially after 40-50 years of research.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Because manual input devices aren't available to
| quadriplegics and earlier solutions (e.g. sip/puff
| controller used to select single letters from an on-screen
| keyboard) are relatively very slow.
| grogenaut wrote:
| When typing in passwords on a phone I have to visualize the
| keystrokes by thinking about the finger movements and
| concentrating on my forearms without really moving my
| fingers. Generally once fast and once slow to think about the
| actual activations.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Great point! The electrode arrays used in these studies are
| implanted in the participants' motor cortex in an area called
| the "hand knob". Neurons here are highly modulated during
| motor output, not only for the hand, but also for the rest of
| the body. This area is close to the output though, and
| abstract higher-level features like the "idea of an A" isn't
| likely to be decodable from neurons there. Future research is
| looking at exactly this, but will likely require recording in
| a different area.
|
| For context, I did my PhD in the lab that did the work in
| this article.
| drbojingle wrote:
| The great thing about this is that with the proper use of
| snippets and auto completion 90 characters per minute can quickly
| translates to more than 18 wpm.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27134049
| twotwotwo wrote:
| A neat thing is this uses a language model reduce the error rate
| a lot. Autocorrect, conceptually, though theirs is offline rather
| than as-you-input. In a way the clever software involved is maybe
| the thing that most makes it relevant to this site.
|
| Other tricks we use for noisy touchscreen input could apply here
| too. For one thing, we've got different models for to collect
| input. You could try offering autocompletions/predictions to make
| typing long words faster (long a thing in e.g. single-switch
| input tools), if watching a screen doesn't slow the person down
| much. You could try a swipe-like flow where you collect a chunk
| of data imprecisely but fast (mentally type or scribble a whole
| word, say), then offer choices.
|
| (Thinking about other extremes, I wonder if there's a way at
| faster input using a T9-like reduced alphabet (3x3 grid, pick row
| and column?) or something like that. Or if it could someday work
| to for people to try to speak or visualize words instead of
| handwrite.)
|
| You might be able to glue the letter decoding and language model
| together more closely--feed the letter-decoding NN's uncertainty
| and less-probable guesses (25% chance this 'e' was really an 'l')
| to the lang model.
|
| You could learn a person-specific language model, seeding it with
| a person's writings/speech before the injury or disease (if
| available), whatever else you think they might need
| (family/friend names, care requests, etc.), and training the
| language model as they use the interface (paper already does that
| with the character-recognizing model).
|
| You could do explicit "mutual training"--while the machine
| samples how you write letters, it can show you its certainty
| scores (based on the model it has so far) or maybe something
| graphical to help you write the letters how it expects
| (exaggerate certain differences etc.). They already have an
| "optimized alphabet" that maximizes the machine-visible
| differences between letters.
|
| From their paper, the existing language model already did very
| well at producing clean results in this test, but the more you
| can refine the cleanup, the more you can potentially sacrifice
| cleanliness of input for greater speed, and maybe get closer to
| speaking rate.
|
| FWIW some Googling found
| http://web.stanford.edu/~shenoy/GroupPublications/WillettEtA...
| goldenkey wrote:
| Knowing that the average typing speed of adult humans is a measly
| 40 wpm gives me more faith in the failure of our species.
|
| Sir Francis Galton pioneered the study of psychometrics which
| showed that intelligence is positively correlated with reaction
| speed. So it's not surprising that the average person is slow at
| a cognitive task like typing..
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Galton
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometrics
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_box
| haskellandchill wrote:
| > Knowing that the average typing speed of adult humans is a
| measly 40 wpm gives me more faith in the failure of our
| species.
|
| Uh, that we can even type is in and of itself a wondrous thing.
| Enjoy your miasma.
| goldenkey wrote:
| Biology is just carbon based circuitry based on digital base
| 4 (DNA.) Electronics are just as messy with tin whiskers,
| fried resistors, capacitors, memory errors, clock mistimings,
| etc.. Energy itself is miasma. But okay, I'll enjoy my
| privileged "human" miasma ;-)
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Are there any study precisely correlating IQ with writing
| speed?
| zentiggr wrote:
| I'm pretty much done citing anything mentioning IQ since it's
| been so thoroughly 'debunked'.
|
| And I'm at least partly a victim of the "but your IQ is so
| high - you could do so much!" expectation trap. At least
| until I learned to let go of other people's expectations and
| just be myself.
| pythonlion wrote:
| Humans typing slow, the end is near! It doesn't matter how fast
| you type what matter is you don't always type stuff like this
| lallysingh wrote:
| .. even worse is how slowly we think!!
| [deleted]
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's been clear to me for several years that the future of
| computing is BCI coupled with augmented reality.
|
| However, considering how much the now-normalized ill effects of
| the digital privacy dystopia we're already living in would be
| multiplied by that development, I really fear for the future.
| superkuh wrote:
| It's too bad the ieee.org site itself no longer has words on it.
| It's just a javascript application spinner gif.
| rareform wrote:
| works for me, it auto-reloads the page for some reason tho
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